The United Nations may have officially tagged 2017 as The Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development and the Chinese dubbed it Year of the Fire Rooster, but I am inclined at this point to declare it: Year of the Rising Tide of Multicultural Voices.

Sounds a little awkward I know. However, it is fairly accurate and the poetic quality lends to the description an aspect of hopefulness as opposed to a smell of certifiable doom.

​The tones of the Rising Tide of Multicultural Voices range from the humanely compassionate and passionately engaged to the apathetically detached and dangerously dictatorial. They include, but certainly are not limited to, the following:

African-Americans, although increasingly dubious about ever closing the racial divide in the United States and living as citizens with equal opportunities who are not routinely targeted for marginalization or annihilation, continue to do more than protest such issues. Advocates for racial justice and equality have become more inclined to propose solutions in the form of social data analyses used to formulate strategies for making changes in institutional procedures and individual behavior to help avoid violent conflicts.

White-Americans who continue experiencing difficulty accepting Donald Trump as POTUS alternately engage dialogues to help the president help the country move forward. When finding compliance too difficult, some encourage "resistance" to administrative policies they consider non-democratic or inhumanely repugnant.

Immigrants and Refugees fleeing to America and other lands as yet in 2017 wander the earth like tribes in Biblical times, but the mainstream media and social media of these modern times continues to amplify their cries for compassion and force humanity to examine hidden depths of conscience.

Members of the American Press, traditionally referred to as "the fourth branch of a democratic government," feeling under attack by the POTUS via his frequently-tweeted condemnations, have found themselves switching back and forth between reporting the news and using their platforms as journalists to fight a war of presidential accusations.

​Add to the above chorus Native Americans and committed environmentalists taking a stand against the on-again Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines, women across the globe convinced they have been cheated of their time to shine in history, and Millennials struggling to find the right balance between trust placed in technology and the flaring passions of their innate humanity.

​In truth, members of any number of various demographic groups who thought they had gained solid social and political ground on which to stand for the rest of their lives during former U.S. president Barack Obama's administration are now screaming "Oh hell no!" as the new commander-in-chief --doing exactly as he promised to when campaigning for the job--steers America toward the far right.

Allowing Ourselves to Hear Each Other

Probably the biggest mistake anyone can make when wishing for his or her voice to be heard and respected is to ignore the voices of everyone else. That observation helped drive the launch and growth of the Creative Thinkers International (CTI) online community 10 years ago.

The sharing of visions and voices for the purpose of inspiring unity in a world turned morbidly cynical by 9/11 was what made the community possible and drove it to thrive for nearly a decade. At a time when hatred threatened to permanently erase the potential for any meaningful cooperation between cross-cultural populations, Creative Thinkers International demonstrated the exact opposite: unity in the name of shared humanity.

​The glorification of hatred is predicated on a foundation of fear-induced ignorance venomous to haters and those they believe they hate. Without awareness of root causes inflating their fears, prejudices, and destructive actions, it is easy for someone such as an alt-right terrorist, or a jihadist more faithful to a love of violence than love for Allah, to misinterpret aggravated frustrations as saintly devotion. Given the chance to do so, their own hearts can provide the insight necessary to correct themselves.

For Creative Thinkers International in 2007, allowing ourselves to hear each other and work together to identify the common ground on which we could build trust and cooperation was a matter of working to either: 1) sustain humanity; or 2) watch it simultaneously implode and explode. It is not so different at this 2017 moment in history when words like "polarization," "fake news," and "alternative facts" shape stories heard, viewed, and read every day.

Most people understand achieving unification is more complicated than sticking labels on entire populations and trusting in bias or bigotry to solve the world's most existential dilemmas. Many, however, do not bother to consult any kind of discerning social or political analyses of the turmoil raging around them like the very real tornadoes that slammed New Orleans East on February 7, 2017 (twelve years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused historical damage from which the city is still recovering). To them it is a simple matter of opposing dichotomies: good versus evil, white versus black, the past versus the future, the aged versus youth, East/West, Christian/Muslim, nationalism/globalism, and so on.

Empowered Consciousness

What does it take for us to hear each other clearly enough to not only respect what is being said but understand that often the concerns of one group or individual mirror those of "the other." How do we recognize and remove the most unyielding roadblocks to harmonious coexistence between nations and communities?We begin by acknowledging the reality of the need to do so. We begin by setting aside denials of truth blazing like wildfires right in front of our faces.​In addition, for example, to xenophobia and cultural bias, we know the so-called wealth gap and insufficient education all fall in the same category of oppressive strategies that do not work. We know also that a predatory instinct prompts some power-brokers to use divisiveness as a tool to manipulate social unrest for personal financial benefit. That is a sadly-cruel non-alternative fact we are able to improve with the kind of empowered consciousness represented by the 2017 Rising Tide of Multicultural Voices.

Author

​Author-Poet Aberjhani is currently completing a book of nonfiction narratives about race relations, histories of erasure, the cultural arts, and practices of slavery in his hometown of Savannah, Georgia, USA.

If you’re a regular reader of my national African-American cultural arts column, you may have noticed that I have not been posting articles as frequently as I once did. The reason is simple enough. Having reached a certain point in the research for my current book-in-progress (at least one of them anyway) I had to reduce as many additional writing obligations as possible to fully concentrate on completion of the work. For me, this is the part of authorship when the lyrical muse sings and the creative pen dances. The greater bulk of the more rigid tasks of verification and documentation have been satisfied, and imagination may be allowed to take over the processes of narrative construction. The resulting musical flow of image and language stamp the work with its own unique identity. And its own self-defined meanings destined to merge with different readers’ interpretations of the same.

The Writer and the Times

I started the national African-American cultural arts column on July 13, 2009, with a story about the debut of Johnny and Me, Savannah author Miriam K. Center’s play based on her friendship with the late 4-time Academy Award-winning composer Johnny Mercer. That was followed by a profile of acclaimed artist Jerome Meadows. The next month, August, saw the launch of the controversial series on the trial (and eventual execution) of Troy Anthony Davis, convicted for the murder of Savannah policeman Mark Allen MacPhail. Not writing about Davis’s trial, to my mind, would have been a case of gross negligence. Doing so was one early indication of what readers would discover over the next few years: basically, I found it impossible to restrict myself (as asked to do) to the subject of “the arts” as pertaining to African Americans. How could that have been likely for someone who had already chronicled the global multicultural impact of the Harlem Renaissance in the pages of an encyclopedia, and whose first novel featured a cast of post-Millennials on a parallel Earth? I could no more refrain from engaging political discourse within a column bearing my name than Zora Neale Hurston could have resisted writing black dialect or Franz Kafka could have ignored the absurdities of his existential dilemmas.

Moreover, how could it even have been possible in the era that saw such titanic events as these: the two-term presidency of Barack H. Obama, America’s first African-American commander-in-chief, the domino effect of the Arab Spring in 2011, the death of a global pop icon like Michael Joseph Jackson in 2009, the advent of civil war in Syria with its subsequent refugee and migrant crisis, the heart-rending terror of Boko Haram and the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, the Black Lives Matter Movement, the astonishing triumphs of the Marriage Equality Movement, massive shifts in population demographics, and the end of diplomatic estrangement between Cuba and the United States. Just to name a few. This is not, of course, to say that during the same period I considered the cultural arts any less important than national or international politics. It has been more than thrilling to share with readers through this specific platform essays on such topics as: the poetry of Elizabeth Alexander, the life and legacy of Maya Angelou, the novels and ever-increasing relevance of Toni Morrison, reports on winners of the Nobel Prize, the enduring literary vision of James Baldwin, the annual global triumph of International Jazz Day, profiles of Kennedy Center honorees, and reviews of some of the most important films of our modern times.

Framing the 21st Century with Interpretive Journalism

I also took the liberty of expanding the parameters of the column to introduce a number of analytical concepts particularly applicable to the 21st century. These included several running series that provided in-depth explorations of captivating issues. When it came to political events and social developments, I named my style of coverage interpretive journalism for its combination of original news reportage and editorial commentary––sometimes presented with poetry. Emerging facts, such as those regarding the 7 children and 20 adults murdered by 20-year-old Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School (and in the home he shared with his mother) in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012 could send recipients of such news reeling for years with shock and disbelief. It was the potential significance behind the facts that I chose to communicate to readers and which I hoped they found useful.

Indeed, much of this century’s first decade and a half has been comprised of trends and unforeseen progressions that basically trashed reality as humanity knew it and reconstructed it via the mechanisms of a technology-based revolution. No sphere of endeavor––whether in classrooms and boardrooms, or on football fields and battlefields––was left unchanged. Some of my stronger attempts to bring usable meaning to those historical changes took the form of the following long-term projects:

Each of the above statements applies well enough to my own convictions as a creative thinker and very precisely to the newest installment of genesis pages for the Guerrilla Decontextualization project. It is titled Abbreviated Mind Syndrome, and yes, it does encourage readers to wade into some fairly deep waters of reflective considerations. But hey, when it comes to living a life devoted to constructing organic meaning and functional perspective out of language, there are few roles to which committed wordsmiths do not give themselves. That of the poet, social critic, fictionist, essayist, playwright, historian, journalist, and lecturer may all at some point place a hat of responsibility upon our pensive brows. For me, the launch of the Guerrilla Decontextualization initiative in 2012 served as an introduction to territories occupied by linguists, philosophers, and social critics. I make no claims to possessing the finely-honed tools which the more outstanding names in these fields have mastered. What I do possess are the restless curiosities they inspired and a lifelong interactive relationship with literature.

Digitized Intimacy

The phrase abbreviated mind might at first lead you think it refers to the modern practice of shortening words and statements to accommodate such technology-driven forms of communication as tweets and instant messaging. These practices can contribute to the cultivation of an abbreviated mind but the new essay series identifies a greater range of causes, effects, and consequences. (Current plans are to take the exploration much further in the proposed book on Guerrilla Decontextualization.) For those who appreciate such digitized intimacy, technology’s ability to allow people to enjoy a sense of constant connectedness is one of its most rightly-celebrated advantages. It enables family members, friends, and an extended network of tagged associates to share experiences of the moment––even if the sharing is sometimes a little too hasty and can’t be withdrawn.